Deep Learning Indaba𝕏

South Africa 2019

Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence Conference

THanks to everyone for an awesome event!

14 - 17 April2019

DurbanSouth Africa

200+Attendees

30+Speakers

Speakers

Africa in AI — Panel Discussion

This opening discussion will address Africa’s impact on all things artificial intelligence. While many like panels tend to go with “AI in Africa” or “How can we grow machine learning in Africa”, we thought we would make Africa the defining term, to indicate that Africa has the control over AI. This also serves our narrative for the discussion: focusing on AI and its complexities from our African perspectives rather than Africa from an AI perspective.

We welcome a diverse and experienced group of people to introduce what AI means to them and how it is influencing our world. This includes some of our amazing speakers who will be joined by Prof. Francesco Petruccione, the Pro-Vice Chancellor of Big Data and Informatics at UKZN, and Sicelukwanda Zwane, who is an MSc candidate with the CSIR at Wits focusing on the intersection of robotics and machine learning. Christopher Currin (PhD Computational Neuroscience at UCT) will be facilitating the panel to guide the conversation from introduction to impact.

Community Partner

Location

FAQ

Unfortunately, applications have closed and we do not have any extra capacity. We encourage you to apply for one of the many other Indaba𝕏 events around the continent or to the main Indaba event, and, to keep an eye open for next year's Indaba𝕏 ZA.

Decision notices were sent out on the 15th of March. Please check your spam folder if you did not receive an email from us. If you still can't find it then please email us at info@indabax.co.za and we'll let you know.

Thank you for your interest in attending Indaba𝕏 South Africa. While we can't go into the specifics of why any particular applications were not accepted, we can say that we had almost 470 applications for only around 200 places. This meant that we had to make a large number of tough decisions and had to reject a number of excellent applicants. If your application was rejected it is most likely that there was nothing particularly wrong with the application but rather that it was missing something to make it stand out.

Here are some tips to strengthen your next application:

Show that you are committed to learning more about machine learning. For example, if you've taken an online course (such as Andrew Ng's Coursera course) you should mention it (and if you haven't we would highly recommend doing so).

Talk about how you are already using, or how you plan to use, machine learning for your work or research.

Talk about how you are contributing to your local machine learning community. For example, do you organize meetup events, run lectures, or lead a study group?

Make sure you put plenty of effort into the application since this is one way for us to judge your interest in attending.

Please don't be discouraged by this result. We encourage you to apply for one of the many other Indaba𝕏 events around the continent or to the main Indaba event, and, to keep an eye open for next year's Indaba𝕏 ZA.

We are still working hard to finalize the details of the hackathon, however, we can give you some details at this point.
There will be four challenges for you to tackle, each with different difficulties and kinds of data, so everyone should be able to participate.
Each of these challenges is provided by our hackathon sponsors and is based on a real problem they are trying to solve!
Our hackathon sponsors have some great prizes lined up for the winners of each challenge, so bring your A-game!

We recommend that you bring your own laptop if possible, however, for those of you who can't we'll provide lab computers.
Don't worry about installing any software beforehand (or about bringing a powerful computer) — we'll be using Google Colab which is accessed through the browser, comes with all the necessary software, and gives access to an Nvidia GPU.

Unfortunately, due to space limitations, not everyone can present their poster at the event. If you are one of the those who are presenting you will have been informed in your acceptance notification email. We recommend that you print your poster before arriving in Durban.